About the AUTISM Mailing List

The AUTISM Mailing List (AUTISM@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU)
is an open e-mail-based forum to discuss autism hosted
by St. Johns University, and administered by volunteers
(autism-panel@hunter.apana.org.au);
there is a
page about the mailing list that has much of the same material on this page,
plus more useful information).
The list includes parents, autistic people, researchers, professionals,
students, and other people interested in autism.
Discussion is lively: many weeks see 500 or more postings.
It is a very good forum for posing a question for which you do not
know who would have the answer.

The mailing list is administered by the software, LISTSERV,
which gives you the ability
to subscribe, sign off, get past messages, stop mail during vacations,
get the mail in a digest, and other things, all without the necessity
of asking someone to do it for you
(LSoft, the developer of LISTSERV has a
page about this list too).
You can get instructions in how to do these things by sending
the text "help" to the address
LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU.
Here are brief instructions for some of the more common requests it
can handle:

Subscribing to the list

Send the text "subscribe autism
Firstname Lastname" (i.e., with your first name and last name) as the
first line of an e-mail message to
LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU.
LISTSERV will reply with a confirmation request including its
own instructions.
Once you are subscribed, you will receive all mail sent to
AUTISM@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU, and any mail you send to that address
will be sent to all the members of the AUTISM mailing list.

Once you are subscribed, you can adjust LISTSERV to send the postings
to you as one long message per day instead of the usual one hundred
or more.
To set this up, send the text "set autism digest" to
LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU.

Note: do not send requests to subscribe or sign off to the list
itself. This practice results in thousands of people getting lots
of extra messages. Be careful to send LISTSERV commands to LISTSERV,
or contact the folks who run the list.

Who to e-mail about issues relating to this list

If you have a question about autism, you can join the list
and pose your question to the list members.
If you need to contact someone about an issue with the list itself,
you can contact the list administrators
(autism-panel@hunter.apana.org.au).

There is a small repository of files compiled by people on the
list which is available via e-mail from
LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU.
To get a list of files, send the single line

index autism

LISTSERV will e-mail you a list of files, each with a two-part name,
e.g. "AUTISM IMMUNE" (called the filename and the filetype).
To retrieve one of the files, send get filename filetype
to LISTSERV, i.e. for the "AUTISM IMMUNE" file

get autism immune

LISTSERV will e-mail you the file.

Archive of messages posted to the AUTISM mailing list

The LISTSERV software keeps an archive of all the messages
ever posted to the AUTISM Mailing List.
They are available on the web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/autism.html
which also gives you the means to search them.
You will be asked for a LISTSERV password and offered the chance to
get one if you don't have one.

The archives can also be retrieved by e-mail (see
Getting related files above) and searched by
e-mail (next section).

Searching the archive using E-mail

Using e-mail, you can make LISTSERV search
and retrieve messages from the archive.
To search the archives, send an e-mail message to
LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
with a "search" command as the body of your message such as
the single line:

search 'greenspan' in autism

LISTSERV will return a list of all postings that match your search
command, giving a number for each posting which you can use to retrieve it.
In this example it returns all postings to autism since it started
which contain the string greenspan anywhere in their body.
You can further narrow your search by time, sender, or subject
of the postings. Here are 3 example search commands:

In the first example LISTSERV lists all postings that have the word
greenspan anywhere in their body and were posted to the autism list
since July 24, 1996.

In the second example LISTSERV lists all postings containing the word
greenspan in their body that were ever posted to the autism list
and had smith anywhere in the "From:" mail header line.

In the third example the asterisk (*) means to list all postings which
contain the word intro anywhere in their subject header.

Once you receive the list of matching postings from LISTSERV you review
this list and decide which if any you want to receive.
Each posting listed will have a number in the left most column that
is used to identify the posting to LISTSERV.
To receive several of the postings listed you must send another
message to LISTSERV using the "getpost" command to request
the postings
you want LISTSERV to return. For example if you requested a list of
postings using the "search" command and decided that you want postings
numbered 153, 756, 757, 758, and 1821
then you would send a message back to
LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
with this single line as the body of your message:

getpost autism 153 756 757 758 1821

Since you want three sequential postings 756, 757, and 758
you can indicate them as a range in your "getpost" command like this:

getpost autism 153 756-758 1821

LISTSERV will return the postings you requested combined into a single
return message.
If you want to get all postings posted since February 12, 1997 you could send
LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
this line as a message:

search * in autism since 97/2/12

When LISTSERV returns the list of postings look at the first
and last entries in the list and see what their ID numbers are.
For example they could be 3244 and 3585. If so then send back to
LISTSERV another message using those ID numbers as the start and end of
a range of postings for it to return. For example:

getpost autism 3244-3585

One final word: while I have nothing to do with running this
mailing list, I do know from personal experience that running such
open, world-wide e-mail lists is no picnic and it represents work.
I thank the administrators for their effort and implore you to
be kind to them.
-John Wobus